Coombe Mill Blog

"Tales from the farmers wife" shares the funny and interesting happenings on our lovely holiday farm with Farmer Nick and our 6 children. A behind the scenes look on balancing family, farming, the holiday business and cooking for all.

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Den building and campfire cooking

Den building and campfire cooking on holiday. An organised event with homesourced wild garlic for stick wrapped garlic bread. ... Read More

Posted on August 4th, 2017 - Fiona

With a summer that has been characterised by sun and rain the bugs and insects are rife here on the farm. Rather than say “ew”, we have been embracing them and making them part of our activity hour studies and crafts. We had so much fun a few weeks ago despite a very damp day I decided to revisit the world of the minibeast on a sunny afternoon with frogs and some new crafts.

A Giant Minibeast Board Game

The make-believe bug pair’s game of last time was a big success so I built on the idea for this week with a giant minibeast game that the children helped to create. I had a worm board and a dice with some challenge cards and squares set out and the children added the rest.

They made coloured counters from milk bottle tops with fingerprint minibeasts on the top and decorated the playing board with lots of little creepy crawlies in fun colours.

When they were all finished we played a game. It was great fun with everyone joining in the challenge questions like “Leap like a frog” and “sing Incy wincey spider” to move up 3 places.

The game provided the perfect mix of jumping around and concentrating on counting on places together with painting fun. I’ll definitely be looking at DIY games more in the future but for now my discerning little ones had spotted my pebbles waiting to be painted.

Painting Bug pebbles

I collected and painted white a selection of bug shaped pebbles from a family beach trip the day before and the children couldn’t wait to get turning them into bees, ladybirds and centipedes like the ones in our fairy gardens.

Off on a minibeast hunt

Once everyone was cleaned up we left our pebble bugs to dry in the sun and headed out with magnifying glasses to find some real bugs down in the fairy gardens. Farmer Nick’s carved fairy toadstools always reveal a wealth of little beasties scurrying to and fro and the children were thrilled with crowing round to identify them all. We saw centipedes, beetles, woodlice and lots of worms. There was even a shiny unidentified bug that had everyone confused and fascinated in equal measure.

We progressed down through the bug hotel peering into pipes and dislodging logs where we saw spider webs and snails but no spiders in residence.

Baby Frogs on the farm paths

From here we headed over to the farm in search of baby frogs. We were rewarded with lots of little jumping frogs that leapt from our hands. The children laughed as it was just as they had practice leaping like a frog in our minibeast game right at the start.

Help the frog catch a fly

Back at our craft table we continued the frog theme with some fly catching frogs that made another great little game for the children to keep. I’m going to follow up with a tutorial on these for #Trash2Treasure as they are such fun and easy to make.

Mini beast crafts have so much millage and so many possibilities; I have a stack in my head I still want to try. They are great for normalising touching and investigating these little beasties in real life for kids.

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Posted on July 7th, 2017 - Fiona

So it rained and it rained but we didn’t let that stand in the way of an afternoon of fun with minibeasts. Remembering what a great afternoon it made last year I was keen to develop and adapt the theme to meet the needs of our little preschoolers this year. Retreating into the games room we set out the plans for our afternoon from crafts to outdoor exploring. We were determined to manage at least part of the afternoon outdoors and thanks to the natural umbrella from the canopy of trees over the fairy gardens and down near the river we managed it.

Minibeast Pairs

Bearing in mind most of the children were just age 2 and 3 with a couple age 4 I wanted to keep the crafts easy yet educational and came up with an inspired idea for minibeast pairs. We played a game with my DIY cards so that everyone could practice colour matching. Then the children made their own card sets. As the minibeast bodies were just fingerprints it was easy for the children to do themselves with parents just helping the younger ones to add the legs and antennae.

Rainbow spiders

We set our pairs game on one side for the paint to dry ready for the children to take home and set about some friendly hand print spiders. They decided to make their spiders in colourful paints and not just black, I thought this made them look friendlier and welcomed the idea.

Colourful critters

A woven forest with minibeasts

We took our colourful creatures out with us to my woodland spider web down by the river and the children wove them into the web adding nature to make a minibeast forest.

After all our fun with make believe beasties it was time to hunting for some real ones. The Fairy gardens with our bug hotel are a perfect place to search with the added benefit of a canopy of branches overhead giving us protection against the rain. Even though it was midsummer, the rain had made it dark and a combination of phone torches and magnifying glasses helped us to see.

We lifted Farmer Nick’s stools and carved mushrooms to see woodlice, centipedes and worms all scurry away from the light.

The children were fascinating moving from one location to the next. I was delighted that they were happy to pick them up and let them crawl across their hands. These little ones were quite fearless and full of curiosity. I’m sure our fun crafts beforehand helped.

Have you studied minibeasts with children before?

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Posted on July 2nd, 2017 - Fiona

Right now the sheep and lambs in the fields are shedding their winter coats, if they haven’t already been sheared. If you go on a country walk you can often pick bits of fleece out of the fences where they have been rubbing up against them. In our case we had a mountain of fleece available to us after shearing our sheep back in May. While most of the fleece went to a local crafter we held back a few handfuls for crafts during our weekly activity hour. Sheepscapes are one of my favourites. A 3D sheepscape picture is so simple and ideal for preschool children to make. The finished result is very effective and just like our Jacobs sheep here on the farm.

What you’ll need

Cereal box

Sheep fleece

Black paint

Googly eye

Grass and wild flowers

Floristry ribbon or string

Stapler

Double sided sticky tape

Method to make a sheepscape picture

Go for a walk and collect some sheep’s wool, there’s usually some on the fences around the edge of fields.

Open a cereal box up and cut to leave one side and one long edge.

Trim the excess edges from around the box.

Paint a hand black and make a print so that the fingers form the feet and the thumb is spaced out for the neck and face. Add an extra fingerprint on the thumb for where the eye is going to go.

Stick a blob of fleece to the wet paint for the body.

Stick a googly to the wet paint for the face.

Place a line of double sided sticky tape over the fold in the box.

Stick grass and wild flowers to this and bend up.

Add ribbon to create a 3D Sheepscape hanging picture.

Hang up on display for all to see.

A few alternatives you could try

Try with a group of children on a play date or as a party craft

Paint your hand in multicolour for the body and add a few dabs of paint to the fleece then sing ‘Bah bah rainbow sheep’

Paint a few sheep on a large wall canvas and create a meadow with big hands for the mothers and tiny hands for the lambs

Cut your sheep out to put on sticks and create your own sheep story in a mini theatre by painting a cardboard box as the theatre.

If you can’t find any sheep wool you could always use cotton wool.

A quick minute long video on how to make a 3D sheepscape picture

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Posted on June 23rd, 2017 - Fiona

After making vintage tea cups and saucers into bird feeders I was keen to find a way to use these as part of our activity hour. As is so often the case, once I have an idea for a theme, then the whole afternoon plan begins to fall into place. A bird spotters trail along the old Welly Walk would replace my old tin can flowers with my 7 tea cup bird feeders and 2 bird houses to find and fill with goodies.

Every good bird spotter needs some binoculars

These were so easy to make and put the children in the right mindset. A couple of toilet rolls stapled together and some ribbon and we were ready for some creative painting.

A post shared by Coombe Mill (@coombemill) on May 26, 2017 at 10:33am PDT

With a gentle breeze and a glorious hot day, we hung the binoculars out to try ready for going on the trail.

Goosey Gandar in the grass

While our binoculars dried we set to work turning paper plates into geese just like the ones at Coombe Mill. A little clever cutting and folding gave some surprisingly good results. We showed them off against blue craft paper, picked grass for the geese to sit in and mounted them on card ready to hang.

This took just enough time to allow our binoculars to dry and everyone collected their bespoke coloured binoculars ready for the bird spotters trail.

To keep little legs motivated on our trail I handed out bird spotters trail sheets and pens packed with things to tick off and do along the way.

On an adventure along the bird spotters trail

The first thing to spot was the welly walk signs telling us the way to go. From here we were looking out for old wellies, tea cups and bird houses. I had a watering can ready to collect water from the brook and some birdseed with me; the children helped to add the seed to each of the saucers and fill the cups with water.

At each step the children ticked things off. There were birds to try and spot through the binoculars and bird songs to listen for. Annoyingly the most prevalent bird was the crow after our chicken eggs from the adjacent field!

Bird spotters treat

My cane tunnel was still looking great and the children ran through to discover the lovely shallow paddling area in the brook the other side and the tree swing. This was the perfect place to play and enjoy the afternoon sun before the trek home.

I am planning to work on the bird spotters trail sheets a little more and leave laminated copies in our reception for holiday guests to take and work though in their own time. Without a big noisy group of us there will be more birds to spot!

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Posted on June 16th, 2017 - Fiona

I was determined to fit in a week working with herbs, and in particular wild garlic, before it was over on the farm for another year. Wild garlic has such a strong smell rather like spring onions and so useful in cooking. I had a feeling many of our children staying would not have noticed it during the week with us and so I decided on a spot of foraging for herbs and baking savoury scones as the basis for our activities this week.

Preparing to study herbs

We began by cutting up a cereal box to make a backing board for our theory work together with a clever little pouch to store the herbs we would find. Printed information sheets on each herb were stapled next to the pouch with sensory information to fill in on the herbs.

Foraging for herbs

With our work all prepared we set off in search of our herbs. The wild garlic was just at the end of flowering and having showed the children what to look for they soon came across some along the farm paths. Armed with a good bunch for everyone we headed into my garden for snippets of all the other herbs I had growing. We had 6 to collect in total and the children needed help to carry back their haul.

Making wild garlic and cheese savoury scones

Back at the craft tables we washed hands ready for cooking. I had all the ingredients for cheese and wild garlic scones. We measured, mixed and kneaded the ingredients together before cutting them into hearts and stars to go in the oven. The children were wonderful at taking turns to help at every stage.

Completing herb worksheets

While the scones cooked the children began to complete their worksheets using the collected herbs. They rubbed each herb on the page to release the smell and then wrote down how it smelt, felt and looked along with what foods it was used in. They were great at suggesting foods the herbs reminded them of.

A post shared by Coombe Mill (@coombemill) on May 19, 2017 at 11:56am PDT

Writing up the savoury scone recipe

They worked really hard and made a lovely job of completing their worksheets before moving on to recapping the recipe we used for the scones. I handing out printed sheets where the children just had to fill in the amounts of each ingredient and mount them onto coloured card of their choice decorating them with felt tip pens.

I just had time for a photo of everyone with their competed recipes and herb cards while our delicious smelling freshly baked savoury scones cooled enough to eat.

I was thrilled that every scone was eaten with the children all tasting their hard work and the parents polishing off any going spare. I can safely say cheese and wild garlic savoury scones make a very tasty snack. This turned into a really fun and educational afternoon with even the parents learning a thing or two about cooking with wild garlic.

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Coombe Mill

“Tales from the farmers wife” shares life on our lovely holiday farm with Farmer Nick and our 6 children. Step into our beautiful 30 acres and experience nature close up with farming and educational crafts in stunning North Cornwall. Family, fun and adventure start here.

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